Seatbelt for Pharaoh
by Zenthisoror
Summary: A taxi-driver picks up an unusual customer. (Disclaimer - characters belong to the Death Note franchise. Apologies, I would edit the document if I could but doesn't seem to be allowing me to either a) save my edits or b) upload new documents any more. Thank you reading!)
I picked up the warden from the Lawson's round the corner from here. Poor guy was going for a night shift, had been buying his snacks for the night. I thought he looked a bit scared when he hailed me down, but that could have been the white and blue neon behind him or just the night time getting to me as it would get to anybody, so I said nothing about it - just switched on the navigation and took him where he needed to go.

He worked at those warehouses. Yellow Box, they call them, some bright and sunny name to make people feel lively about the things they were packing away in there, stuff to never see the light of day again except maybe in a thousand years, like them old Egyptian pharaohs dead and dusty in them ancient pyramids.

I dropped him off near the overseers' office, parked outside a warehouse where there was a bright white security light over the door.

There was something about these warehouse buildings. They were big and empty, like things that had been scooped out hollow and were being dried into husks under the sun, like shells or skeletons. You looked at any other building and most of the time they'd have a face and a soul and a personality winking through - lights at the window, you know? But, these warehouses, there was not a drop of soul in them, and if there was it was either something lost or waiting to be found, nothing of the here and now.

I kept the car on the ignition as the warden paid his fare. I didn't have any intention of staying there for long, then something moved out there in the shadows behind my car.

The road and everything outside the pool of light at the warehouse entrance might have been dark blue like the deep sea, but I knew the sight a hand hailing me down when I saw one and I wasn't going to turn away a customer.

Admittedly, I had second thoughts when the shadow drew closer. It was a young man in a suit. Crime drama had taught me well that young men didn't come to warehouse areas in suits unless there was some shady, shady business going on, and I had a wife at home and a pair of budgies to feed. I'd be well within my rights as an honest citizen if I drove off then and there and left him to whatever gang warfare he'd been sucked into. Who cared if he washed up in a suitcase a week later somewhere along the Tama?

I stuck my thumb to the button and opened the doors to him.

I hadn't got a look at his face yet but he was doing that shambling, soft-boiled walk of somebody who had been walking too long for their own feet to keep up with anymore. Possibly too high to keep track of trivial Earth concepts such as space and time or too down from drink to bother with any physics but gravity, but, from where I was sitting, he just looked like another young man reaching the end of a long, heavy tether.

I've seen a lot of men like that at this time of night. Usually near bridges, but I guess a quiet place like a warehouse could be just as fine for some final privacy. Sometimes an open door that shows them a world of places they could go to instead of where they were thinking of going to helps. Sometimes it doesn't. It's always worth a try.

A pale hand curved around the doorframe.

The man stepped in.

"Evening."

"Evening!"

I looked at him in the rear view mirror. Light-haired, like a punk or some hafu celebrity but he didn't act like what you might have expected from either. The material of his jacket was thin for the time of year.

The door closed and I set the meter running, the digits blinking red. "Where would you like to go, sir?"

He looked to be in his mid-twenties. His haircut made him look even younger, or at least like some kid who refused to grow up and acknowledge that he had aged past eighteen. He stopped fumbling with the seatbelt to give me an address.

I drummed my fingers on the wheel. "Well, I could take you there, sir, but the building you want is gone. They took it down years ago. Say some rich foreign bloke built it for a Japanese fling of his and when they broke up and she broke his heart he just sold it on to developers. It's all rubble and nothing now. You sure you want to go there?"

"Am I…"

His voice shook so I busied myself with the navigation, gave him some time.

"Am I dead?"

Cold seeped slow and icy as meltwater down my spine. It spread through my limbs, crawled heavy over my skin and all the little hairs on my neck stood on end like frozen dog hackles.

And I noticed all those things I should have noticed earlier, like how it was cold but the young man's breath hadn't been fogging, how the car hadn't dipped when he had climbed on board, how maybe he hadn't even been there by the roadside at all until I imagined he was there and looked hard into the shadows, how, even now, I couldn't hear him breathing.

In the rear-view mirror I saw his eyes – my nieces would go crazy for a guy with eyes like those - and for a long moment they looked at me and I wondered what they saw.

I glanced over my shoulder.

Nothing there but plastic seat covers and a shard of white light from the warehouse entrance sliding in through the window, collecting silver on the dust motes, and a closed door.

Nothing to show that anybody had been there since the warden had gotten out apart from the seatbelt, stretched and clipped into its lock, ready for a drive.

I took a long, slow, deep, bracing breath.

Damn it, I'd already started the meter. I was going to have to pay his fare.


End file.
